As everyone has been gleefully pointing out, KDE 2.1.1 is out. The main features of this release over KDE 2.1 are bugfixes, additional language translations, and numerous documentation updates. As an added bonus, you can now also "paste" a URL to Konqueror and have it automatically load the website. I'm also told that KPilot 4.0.1 is in pretty good shape in this release. See the ChangeLog for more details, and the full announcement here. Enjoy!

SuSE 7.0 had Xfree 4.02 under its update section. It now has 4.03 too. These are provided by SuSE themselves and kickass right out of the box. They have specific instructions too. What do you want more in life ?

This is entirely true. I am currently running SuSE 7.1 with the SuSE versions of XFree86 4.0.3 and KDE 2.1.1, including qt-experimental version 2.3. Everything works except if you turn on anti-aliasing before setting up the fonts properly, DCOP has a heart attack and the symptom you see is no kpanel and no frames around windows - ie KDE window manager apparently not running.

I will post this as a bug report, but it looks like it is a SuSE bug, not a KDE bug, so it will go to feedback@suse.de

How should the fonts to be set up properly? I simply selected clearly-yu in the fonts dialog in kcontrol but received the decribed problems: DCOP dying and a disappeared kpanel. (SuSE 7.1, XFree86 4.0.3, KDE 2.1.1 and qt-experimental version 2.3)

Maybe it's me but one thing that's lacking so far in kde2 for me are nice windows decorations. Just look at sawfish, god these windows decorations are awesome. The aqua interface, brushed metal, etc. They are simply so much better. I think kde2 would gain a lot if we had decorations like those. ( and no I'm not a graphic artist, I couldn't draw a sun ( and that's just sad) not even mentioning decorations).

The aqua theme doesn't install new window decorations. In fact, as far as I can tell, none of the new themes provide actual new window decorations. A few provide new widget sets, but only a few. Most of the themes that are there are just the default widgets with a different color scheme.

We don't need more color schemes and wallpapers on kde.themes.org, we need new, cool-looking window decorations and widget sets! I haven't yet seen a theme that truly uses the full theming power of KDE2 (perhaps because there is so much theming power there :-)

Yes, of course it _supports_ window decorations. The problem is, there are no KDE 2 themes that actually provide any! There are still KDE 1.x themes, and they include window decorations sometimes, but the support for KDE 1 window decorations in KDE 2 isn't perfect (flickers a lot and some other stuff). Besides, KDE 1.x window-decoration themes are terribly restricted when compared with KDE 2 window-decoration themes.

About widget replacements: There are several out now, the most notable being Aqua, but none have made me feel compelled to switch yet. And there is only a tiny piddling number compared to GTK+ widget themes (of which there are hundreds). Of course, KDE can supposedly import GTK+ themes... I haven't tried that yet. I think I'll go do that right now!

Well, aqua changes my system dramaticly, at least all the widgets are changed, and of course the backgrounds of the windows, kicker etc...
Aqua indeed does not change the decoration of the window itself, but other themes do so. Please check them out.
I agree with you that a lot of themes only change the color setting, but if you look further, you wil find some cool themes that change KDE dramaticly

Rinse, you missed the point, he is talking about titlebar decorations. It is not possible (at least not succefully) to theme titlebar yet. Decorations are hardcoded, and theming doesn't give good results. Maximize/minimize buttons change their look if you resize windows, and borders sucks.

There are other windows decorations accessible through the new Theme-Manager introduced in KDE 2.1. Simply chose "MGBreizh" for example and you get a new window decoration which is not implemented in source code !

Yeah, but that's a KWM theme, from KDE 1. The new KDE 2 window decorations are much more flexible (different sized buttons, more flexibility in button placement and behavior, etc), and they do require C++ programming.

There are widget sets galore, from what I can see, but I agree that we need new window decorations. What daunts people with that is that no-one seems to be able to find docs for building window decorations, me included. And speaking of cool looking stuff for kwin, how about tons of neat animations for window exits and entrances, and iconifications?

Well, there are one or two quite nice themes out.
I currently use KwiX, which has relocatable buttons. Then there's Quartz, which has a nice, clean look. Since KDE 2.1 there's a Windows 2000 theme, too... Making a new client really isn't difficult - if you take a simple one as an example, such as the Windows 2000 theme, you should be able to get good results quite quickly.

But I can really recommend KwiX - it has replaced System++ as the fixture on my computers. See:

/* hopefully more people will get interested by this and start writing their own decorations and committing these.. */

I would like to make and contribute my own window decorations, but haven't an idea where to start. If you could point me to the right web site where it tells about how to do this, I would appreciate it much.

I don't know how much detail it goes into about KWin theming, though. And since Mosfet seems to have dropped off the face of the Earth (at least as far as updating his webpage is concerned) I don't know when we can expect his tutorial to be updated.

IIRC, it doesn't talk much about actually coding a window decoration. I wanted to give it a shot a while ago, but simply didn't have the time to figure it out without a tutorial. I think I remember that there were very few comments in the source, and while some people don't need them, I'm a documentation freak (especially because my C++ is rusty). Unfortunately, this meant that it wasn't worth the required effort (not to me, anyway).

If you want more info about a scriptable kwin client, post your ideas to the kde-look thread, where I give some thoughts and ideas about this stuff. Believe me, I'm working on it, but its not trivial, so we need user input, esp. on what features the kwin scriptable client should have to make kwin the best scriptable window manager ever.

When Win95 came out with minimize-maximize-close all in the right hand corner I thought it was the most stupid thing I'd seen. Everything in the same place? I don't know how many times I've seen someone (especially newbie users) close a program by mistake!

This is a dreadful piece of UI and we shouldn't just ape MS on it just because it is common.

What I personally want is what window maker does - close and minimize, clearly separated, and everything else on a popup menu when and if I need it.